Chinese protesting more as social problems grow / Beijing may find it hard to retake reins

Kathleen E. McLaughlin, Chronicle Foreign Service

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 1, 2005

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Social Protests in China. Chronicle Graphic

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Chinese protesting more as social problems grow / Beijing may find it hard to retake reins

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2005-05-01 04:00:00 PDT Shanghai -- Anti-Japanese demonstrators who drew global attention as they marched -- and sometimes rampaged -- in China's large cities in recent weeks are part of a growing climate of dissent in the country, analysts say.

Despite its rising prosperity, China has seen a dramatic increase in public demonstrations after several years of nervous quiet followed the violent government crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. The number of protests grew to more than 58,000 in 2003, when an estimated 3 million Chinese took to the streets to air their grievances, said Scot Tanner, senior China analyst with Rand, citing police statistics.

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While more recent figures are not yet available, Tanner and other analysts agree that spreading civil unrest presents a striking challenge to the Communist government.

"For the past 10 years, this has been going up every single year and it is, by all accounts, driven not by one type of problem or two or three types but by a dozen different types of sparking problems," Tanner said. "There are clearly a number of much bigger forces that are propelling unrest in this society."

For example, even as 20,000 anti-Japanese protesters who massed in Shanghai on April 16 made headlines worldwide, a larger and far more volatile crowd staged an uprising in Huaxi, a village in coastal Zhejiang province a few hours south of Shanghai. Upset over environmental contamination from local chemical plants, 30,000 residents demonstrated in the streets, clashing with police after authorities tried to stop their peaceful protest and seizing control of the town.

Though journalists have since been barred from the town, reports that trickled out painted a scene of chaos. A reporter for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post described the riot as a "melee of epic proportions."

Meanwhile, smaller protests are becoming almost commonplace.

"In a lot of ways, what we're hearing about in Zhejiang is more typical of what is happening all over China," Tanner said. "They have more problems than they have money and political systems to cure them."

Those problems include unfunded government pensions, corruption, environmental degradation, property seizures by the government and a growing gap between rich and poor. In addition, migrant workers who operate what has become a factory to the world are often unpaid for months, struggling to provide basics like education for their children.

As an illustration of rising labor protests, Stephen Frost, Asian labor researcher at the City University of Hong Kong, cited an action last week, unrelated to recent anti-Japan rallies, in which all 20,000 workers walked off the job to demand better pay and a labor union at the Shenzhen phone factory of Japanese-owned Uniden Corp. Other examples abound across China. In the southwest, environmental activists have managed to stave off major hydropower projects through huge protests. Elderly army pensioners staged a demonstration outside government headquarters in Beijing recently to protest their meager living allowances, and Shanghai residents have taken to the streets dozens of times in the past several years to decry the city's demolition of old neighborhoods.

In this atmosphere, critics say the government took a big gamble with its generally hands-off approach to the raucous anti-Japan protests, setting a precedent that will not go unnoticed on the streets.

"Activists are slowly starting to link up, creating a rights-defenders network that reaches across regions and issues," said Sara Davis, China researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Indeed, Tanner said he was impressed with the way protest organizers in Beijing and Shanghai used the Internet and other technology to draw in supporters, organizing marches via e-mails and phone text messaging.

"Four hours before the protests, I knew here in Rockville (Md.) where they were going to meet," Tanner said. "That is just astounding."

The government's laissez-faire attitude toward three weeks of angry Japan protests was apparent in major Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing and the special administrative region of Hong Kong. Law enforcement officials shepherded demonstrators rather than cracking down on them, even though such public gatherings are illegal in China without a permit. In Shanghai, police escorts cheerfully surrounded thousands of marchers as they made their way across the downtown. Officers then formed a barrier around the Japanese consulate but did not stop demonstrators from vandalizing the structure.

Many analysts believe Beijing's hands-off strategy was intended, in part, to allow protesters fed up with their own government to blow off steam at another target. It's a strategy that could easily backfire.

"Everyone knows they are playing with fire," Davis said. "Mass anger continues to bubble up from below, and it could boil over at any time."

Beijing may be getting the message. In the past week, authorities have cracked down on nationalist demonstrators, arresting more than three dozen in Shanghai for vandalism, closing down activists' Web sites and issuing warnings about organizing protests via the Internet and cell phone text messages. Earlier last week, the Liberation Daily of Shanghai called the demonstrations part of "an evil plot" to undermine the government.

But some observers say it may be difficult for Beijing to put the genie back in the bottle. Activists are already threatening more protests for May 4, the anniversary of a nationalistic student uprising in 1919 sparked by a proposal in the Treaty of Versailles to award land in China to Japan.

"The question the government faces now and whenever they start to allow mass protests is whether they'll be able to put the lid back on," Davis said. "Unless there is real systemic change that gives ordinary people access to justice, the day will come when the lid won't fit."

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